COPS Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI)—How Decisions 

were Made to Allocate Approximately $6 Million 

Available When More than $19 Million was 

Requested

The COPS Office received applications from 32 eligible multijurisdictional law enforcement agencies 

requesting $19,679,928 in federal funding for the FY 2015 COPS Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI). 

The COPS Office developed an application to meet the 

requirements of the law

The COPS Office developed an application for CAGI funds that met the requirements of the statute with 

a focus on advancing public safety by providing funds to multijurisdictional task forces to address gang 

activity. Only law enforcement agencies with a multijurisdictional partnership composed of federal, 

state, and local law enforcement agencies to address gang activity were eligible to apply for funding. 

The COPS Office balanced scoring indicators

To measure and compare the necessary scoring indicators, the COPS Office consulted with experts in the 

fields of policing, and criminology to develop appropriate application questions. Applicants were asked 

to submit information regarding their jurisdiction’s gang problem on such indicators as

• current anti-gang activities; 

• planned or current involvement in an anti-gang task force. 

The community policing philosophy engages in a proactive and systematic examination of identified 

problems that can be countered with effective responses. Community policing relies heavily on 

partnerships and relationships between law enforcement and the community it serves. Narrative 

questions were designed to examine an agency’s formation of collaborations with federal, state, local, 

or tribal partners such as other law enforcement and public agencies, private organizations, or 

participation in multijurisdictional task forces. Agencies were asked to identify and describe the types of 

partnerships they intended to initiate or enhance in order to address their identified gang problem.
The COPS Office developed a uniform system of 

evaluating the information that applicants submitted

Comprehensive Review

The 32 eligible applications underwent a comprehensive review process by external gang subject matter 

expert (SME) peer reviewers. 

The SME peer reviewers evaluated the following criteria in the Project Narrative and Budget Narrative 

sections of the application to determine the quality of each application. The reviewers looked at the 

following:

• Problem identification

• Current anti-gang activities

• Anti-gang task force participation

• Collaboration and partnerships

• High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area threat assessment with regard to gangs

• Strategy to achieve program goals

• Applicable and allowable budget items requested

The SME peer reviewers then developed recommendations based on a rating of "Highly 

Recommended," "Recommended," or "Not Recommended" for each proposal. From the 

recommendations, 11 agencies ranked within the "Highly Recommended" rating, and 10 agencies 

ranked within the "Recommended" rating; 11 agencies were ranked within the “Not Recommended” 

rating. Because of funding availability, those agencies that ranked within the “Recommended” and “Not 

Recommended” ratings were removed from further consideration. The agencies that scored within the 

“Highly Recommended” rating were ranked according to the application score received from the SME 

peer reviewers; for agencies that were similar in score, priority consideration was given if the proposal 

targeted gangs of national significance.